Believe in Britain
Hello there! I’m Alan. I live near Bath in the Somerset countryside. I’m a trained (but not practising) journalist, and I created Big Up Britain as a small corner of light in an increasingly dark internet.
I’ve lived in Britain all my life and I feel genuinely lucky to call it home. It’s not perfect, and yes, the weather could be better, but we have an amazing history, fanastic landscapes and amazing food from all corners of the word. As a people we’re funny, caring, fair and resilient. We look out for each other, we keep calm, and we carry on.
The idea here, is simple. We’re surrounded by bad news, in fact we’re drowning in it. Social media and headlines push the negative for clicks, and it’s easy to feel worn down, disconnected or angry as a result. Big Up Britain exists to rebalance that, by shining a light on the good, positive and hopeful things happening across the UK.
There is far more to be thankful for than the news and politicians often let on. This project is about breaking the doom-scrolling algorithms and reminding ourselves of the good, the great, the fun and build our hopes for the future.
The mission is simple. Reduce the bad. Share the good. Believe.
How will this work?
The idea for Big Up Britain (at least for the moment) is to shine a spotlight on good news. However I am one man – it would be impossible for me to report on every good news story myself.
So here’s the plan – when I find some good news (more on that in a moment), I’ll write a brief summary and redirect the reader to the original source so they can read the full article.
Think of Big Up Britain as less of a news site and more of a curated index of good news.
How do you find good news
In the first week of Big Up Britain I found myself spending hours trawling well know news sites and social media feeds to find some golden nuggest worth sharing.
I’ve since streamlined the news discovery.
I now have a plethora of news RSS feeds populating a Spreadsheet – new stories are added every hour. There are hundreds of new stories being generated each day (and most of them, as you may guess, aren’t good news), so with the help of AI and some coding I’ve developed a scoring system for each story.
As each story is added to the spreadsheet it is allocated a score based on its content. Using a -10 to +10 scale. Anything with a low score is discarded – this removes about 80% of stories. I manually peruse the 20% of stories and shortlist the good ones.
Do you feature every ‘good’ article
No, there are a few rules I’m trying to follow – although these may evolve over time.
At the moment I’m showcasing 3-5 stories per day based on the following criteria.
- Is it interesting?
- Can people relate to it?
- Does it have a tangible benefit to the country?
There are a lot of hyper-local good news stories and I’m hoping to feature more ‘local’ stories in the future but right now the focus is on stories at a national level – although a few local stories might slip through on quieter days.
The core goal
The core aim of Big Up Britain is to highlight the good/positive stories and redirect the reader to the original source.
Once a good story is found a brief summary is written (I’m using AI to help with this – as I work full time), publised and then shared to social media – where hopefully it will find an audience.
We’re open to submissions too. If you have or find a good news story – please use the ‘submit story’ option to share it with us.
I’m also keen to highlight new British products – so if you have launched a new product, app or service that is revolutionary in it’s space let us know and we might feature it too!